Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874-1925)
}} Biography Amy Lawrence Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts. She posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Early Life Amy Lowell was a member of the wealthy Boston, Massachusetts, Lowell family of Boston Brahmin ancestry. She was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 1862, the sister of Percival Lawrence Lowell and Elizabeth Lowell (1862-1935) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856-1943). School was a source of considerable despair for the young Amy Lowell. She considered herself to be developing "masculine" and "ugly" features and she was a social outcast. She had a reputation among her classmates for being outspoken and opinionated. Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so. She compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (age 28) after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. Lowell was said to be lesbian, and in 1912 she and actress Ada Dwyer Russell were reputed to be lovers. Russell is reputed to be the subject of Lowell's more erotic works, most notably the love poems contained in 'Two Speak Together', a subsection of Pictures of the Floating World. The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement. Lowell has been linked romantically to writer Mercedes de Acosta, but the only evidence of any contact between them is a brief correspondence about a planned memorial for Duse. Lowell was a short but imposing figure who kept her hair in a bun and wore a pince-nez. Lowell smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. She was associated with her cigar-smoking habit publicly, since newspapers frequently mentioned it.3 A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that poet Witter Bynner once said, in a cruel comment repeated by Ezra Pound and thereafter commonly misattributed to him, that she was a "hippopoetess."4 Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One rebuttal was written by Heywood Broun in his obituary tribute to Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders." 5 Grave of Amy Lowell in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51 and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.6 The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock. That collection included the patriotic poem "Lilacs", which Louis Untermeyer said was the poem of hers he liked best. Vital Records References * - Wikipedia * Amy Lowell - disambiguation * Lowell in Massachusetts - * Amory Family (Boston) - * John Amory Lowell (1799-1881)/immigrant_ancestors - early Colonial New England immigrant ancestors External links Category:American philanthropists Category:People from Boston Category:American socialites Category:Burials at Mount Auburn Cemetery Category:Imagists Category:Lesbian writers Category:LGBT people from Massachusetts Category:LGBT writers from the United States Category:Modernist women writers Category:People from Brookline, Massachusetts Category:Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners Category:LGBT poets Category:American people of Native American descent Category:American women poets Category:20th-century American women writers